He is way off the mark in describing Nottingham as an example of urban sprawl into the green belt with a soulless city centre - a place that meekly agrees to government diktat. If it really was the "heartbreaking" place he describes, how is it that £3.5bn of city-centre development is under way or planned over the next decade? Would the tram Jenkins derides (acknowledged by others as the best in Britain) have attracted £400m of government backing for its expansion? Would we have, contrary to Jenkins's assertion, two of the most popular and highly rated universities in the country, contributing significantly to our growing bioscience, research and technology sector (which incidentally, is where our future lies, not, as Jenkins suggests, in the relocation of Whitehall offices)?

Of course he is right about the need to break the concrete barrier and ugliness of the 50-year-old inner ring road. That's why we recently spent over £14m of government money on its award-winning remodelling to reduce traffic and give pedestrians priority, giving the lie to Jenkins's suggestion that Nottingham "seems to hate" streets. All new development is being carefully planned to link communities to the city centre, not separate them from it, as he claims. Nottingham has one of the largest areas of pedestrian-priority streets in Europe, and they're teeming with life. The city's distinctive medieval street pattern is remarkably intact, with only two of our 1,400 listed buildings (hardly "tombstones in the wilderness") demolished in the past 30 years, and nationally acclaimed conservation successes - including the renovation of the Lace Market which Jenkins graciously acknowledges.

All of this is attracting more people - not fewer, as Jenkins claims - to live in the city centre. In the past five years, about half of all new housing has been in the city centre, which now has a population of some 6,000. Certainly there's no evidence of people being put off Nottingham because of crime. Maybe that's because, unlike Jenkins, they've looked beyond the lazy tabloid labels and realised it's a place they can feel safe in. The latest surveys confirm that Nottingham is not Britain's gun-crime capital. In fact gun crime has fallen by 86%, and crime overall by 15%.

Few cities have less urban sprawl than Nottingham, which has resisted out-of-town shopping centres and business parks. Last year all new housing was on brownfield land - way above government targets. There are no easy answers to the problems of population growth and housing, though sensible extensions to provincial cities must be preferable to overdevelopment in the south-east.

Far from "fighting to recover the confidence displayed in the days of Jesse Boot", we're managing our growth and securing ourselves a prosperous, sustainable future with great ambition. Oh, and for the record, the sheriff of Nottingham wouldn't "sharpen his axe" - she's made of kinder stuff these days.

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